The Early Investigations of Joanne Kilbourn (18 page)

It was just after nine o’clock when I drove down the lane beside Eve’s house and parked in front of the little building she used for her pottery. The neat three-bedroom bungalow that had been the unhappy home of Eve and Andy Boychuk was, I noticed as I drove by, immaculate: the storm windows gleamed hard in the sunlight, the shrubs by the house were wrapped in sackcloth, and the flower beds had been turned over. It was the house of a person who set deadlines and kept them. Eve’s studio was a different story. The grass outside
was uncut and yellowing, and there was pottery everywhere. Pots and vases covered makeshift trestle tables, and a family of cats stalked each other around bowls and plants stacked in the dying grass. Even to my untrained eyes, all these unsold, unsalable pieces spoke of pathology.

As I stood squinting into the sun, Eve came from a lean- to at the back of the pottery. She looked tense but handsome. Her long grey hair was parted in the middle and fell in heavy braids over her shoulders. Her feet were bare, and she was wearing blue jeans and a denim work shirt so faded they were almost white. She was carrying two blocks of fresh clay wrapped in clean heavy plastic that was looped and tied to make a handle.

The sleeves of her shirt were rolled back, and you could see the muscles of her arms taut with the weight of the clay. She dropped the clay blocks in front of me.

“Jo, carry these inside, would you? I need to get a couple more.” I slid my hands through the plastic loops and lifted. The clay didn’t move a centimetre, but I could feel my vertebrae creak. Tomorrow I would be forty-six. I didn’t plan to celebrate the day in traction.

I left the clay on the ground in front of me. “Sorry, Eve – I’ll hold the door for you, but that’s my limit.”

“Oh, Jo. Those things can’t weigh more than forty pounds apiece.” She slipped her hands through the loops and carried them easily into her workroom. I followed behind her like a puppy.

Eve’s studio was a surprisingly pleasant and functional place. It was square, high-ceilinged and cool. There were windows all around, but set high on the wall. The autumn light poured in through them and turned the dusty air of the studio to a yellowy haze. Beneath the windows were shelves filled with pottery that was finished but unfired. In the centre of the room there were two slab worktables and a potter’s
wheel. Along one wall was a long table filled with stuff: plastic bleach bottles cut back to hold sponges, gallon ice cream buckets full of cutting tools and garlic presses and other odds and ends that could press decorations into wet clay. In the corner were a hot plate and an old-fashioned sink.

Eve bent and picked up clay from the potter’s wheel – small pieces that hadn’t worked out. “It’s called reclaiming,” she said, but I noticed when she began to wedge the clay that her hands, always so capable, were shaking. “Damn,” she said, “sorry, Jo, I’m not good for much today.”

“Is there anything I can do to help?”

“No, same old thing,” she said vaguely. “Unless … Jo, there’s a little exercise I do that sometimes brings me down. Do it with me.”

I was uneasy. Eve was always quick to sense the moods of others. “Are you worried playing with the loony will make you loony, too? No permanent damage, I guarantee. Come on, Jo, it might even do you some good.”

She rummaged around in a box of tapes and with a swift and decisive movement ejected the Hindemith that had been playing when we walked in and replaced it with something that sounded like relaxation music from the dentist’s office – waves pounding and a flute. She pulled two chairs side by side and said, “Now just sit and listen. Try to close everything out but the music and my voice.

“Take a deep, cleansing breath – good – now let your hands rest in your lap. Feel the air around them.”

On the tape the waves pounded and a sea gull squawked. “Close your eyes … Think of all the hands you have known.” (Above the waves, the flute notes rose sweet and sad. In the Old Testament the flute is the instrument of death.) “The hands you will never forget … your father’s hands … your mother’s hands … your grandmother’s
hands.” (Ian’s hands warm in mine that first night … Mieka’s baby hand curled around my finger … Peter’s hand surprisingly strong when he gripped my hand and led me up the aisle of St. Anselm’s for his father’s funeral.) “Now think of your hand … Think of all the things your hand has done … Think of how it learned to lift a spoon … grasp a pencil … tie a shoelace … all the tasks your hand has done.” (No flutes now, just the sound of whales singing.) “Working, playing, loving.

“Touch my hand now, Jo.” (Her hands are large, strong, the fingertips rough with dried clay.) “Hands are the reaching out of the heart … Experience my hand. Grasp it tight … now release it … The touch is gone, but the imprint will be there forever.” (Sea gulls, flutes, the whales singing their death song.) “Forever and ever in your heart.”

And we sat in silence, side by side, until the tape was over. Eve looked serene, one hand cupped in the other, palms up, in her lap, her chest rising and falling evenly, her eyes half closed. I was embarrassed. I never seemed to be able to get into these things the way other people could. In the sixties, I was never very good with dope – the magical mystery tour always seemed to leave without me. But the exercise had transformed Eve. When she turned to me her face was wiped clean of pain but her green eyes seemed slightly unfocused, and I wondered, not for the first time, how much dope she had done when she was young. When she spoke, her voice was light and dreamy. “You know, I am so filled with peace that I think I could sleep now if you wouldn’t mind … Or was there something special …?”

I felt ridiculous, Nancy Drew meets Timothy Leary – but I’d played her game. She owed me at least a turn at mine. “Just one question, Eve. Do you know a woman named Lane Appleby?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Eve, you must remember her. She was the one who …” I looked at Eve’s face. She was almost serene. I couldn’t finish. I couldn’t throw those shattering words against the fragile peace she’d drawn around her – the one who walked with us to carry Andy’s body to the ambulance, the one who stood motionless when your mother-in-law spat in her face, the one who endowed the chapel they wheel your vegetable son into every day of his dim and shapeless life.

“The one who what, Jo?”

I put my arm around her shoulders. “Nothing, Eve. Come on, let me walk you up to the house.”

As I followed Eve into her shining, empty house, I thought of all the questions I hadn’t asked. But one question at least had been answered. I couldn’t prove it in a court of law, and Inspector Millar Millard would not applaud the process by which I had arrived at my conclusion, but I was certain that Eve Boychuk had not killed her husband.

I had told Soren Eames I’d see him early in the afternoon. When I left Eve, it was 10:15 and the morning yawned emptily ahead of me – not enough time to drive to the city, but too much to waste hanging around the Charlie Appleby Prayer Centre.

I decided I’d drive over to Wolf River Bible College and see if I could find Lori and Mark Evanson. Eve had worried me. The meditation or whatever it was had helped temporarily, but no relaxation technique in the world was a match for Eve’s demons. Lori and Mark would, I knew, keep an eye on Eve if I asked them. They were limited kids, but they were decent and reliable. Most important, because of Mark’s connection with Carey Boychuk, they saw Eve regularly. She would not feel violated by their concern.

When I drove through the main gate of the college, I felt like I’d driven into an old Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer musical. The students were back. They were everywhere and, by some people’s criteria, they were an appealing bunch: boys with razor-cut hair and button-down shirts and vivid corduroy pants, girls with shining hair and careful makeup and
skirts and sweaters the colours of autumn. Perfect … and yet on this sultry October day, their perfection was jarring. They had the bright, unreal look of a casting director’s idea of students. There was, I remembered, a dress code at Wolf River, but this studied perfection went beyond that. I thought of my own students in their jeans or cutoffs or cords or dashikis, and of their hair, spiked or crewcut or frizzed or bleached or removed entirely, but all of them fumbling, however awkwardly, with an identity. Peter has a phrase that is both final and withering. “He looks as if his mother dressed him.” The kids at the Bible college looked as if their mothers dressed them. It was kind of sad.

Lori Evanson wasn’t hard to track down. I asked one of the perfect boys to direct me and, with a flash of flawless teeth, he did. Lori, he told me, had a new job. She was helping people “get orientated,” and she was working out of the
CAP
Centre. I looked blank. He smiled and said carefully, “The Charlie Appleby Prayer Centre.” Poor Charlie – all that endowment money and he ended up as the first two-thirds of an acronym.

She was in the central reception area, sitting at a table piled high with student handbooks. On her desk was a sign, “Please Disturb Me,” and there was a picture of a cartoon turtle with a grin on his face and a happy-face button on his shell.

When she saw me, her face lit up with pleasure. “Oh, Mrs. Kilbourn, you are just the person I was supposed to see, and now here you are. God always hears us.” She stopped for breath and looked at me confidingly. I’d forgotten how compelling that lilting singsong voice could be.

Lori Evanson was a compelling young woman. If the other college students looked like extras in a movie musical, Lori was the homecoming queen. Her dark blond hair was swept back into a thick braid that fell between her shoulder blades straight as the pendulum on the college clock. The braid was
tied with a broad corded silk ribbon, the same russet red as her angora cardigan and the stripe in her tartan skirt. Her face and neck, still tanned from summer, glowed apricot against her white eyelet blouse. She was beautiful, especially now that this mission to talk to me was about to be accomplished.

“I have a nutrition break in –” She looked carefully at her watch. “Why, my break is right now.” Her voice trilled with good fortune. “Let’s go to Disciples and – please, Mrs. Kilbourn, let me buy you some pie.”

So we walked together through the leafy streets. We made slow progress. Every few feet Lori stopped to welcome someone back or to volunteer news about Mark and Clay. She told me how they’d chosen their son’s name. “You know, like in Jesus is the potter and we are the clay,” she said matter-of-factly.

Lori Evanson seemed to float in a little globe of uncomplicated and undifferentiated joy. She was as filled with delight at a girlfriend’s cute new school bag as she was when a thin, freckled boy told her that since June his cancer had been in remission, or with the news that the pie of the day at Disciples was deep-dish green apple.

When we settled into the booth she chose near the windows, she reached across the table and squeezed both my hands. “I prayed for guidance and here you are.”

Suddenly I felt cold and impatient. “What is it, Lori?”

But her vacant lovely eyes continued to look steadily into mine. “I have to ask you something, and I’ve prayed that my words will be the right words.”

“Lori, what is it? Just ask. If I can help, I will.”

“Well, here goes …” The pleasant, lilting voice rose into the singsong of a child reciting. “Will you support my father-in-law, Craig Evanson, for leader of the party?”

I was astounded. I had been so absorbed with Andy’s death that the leadership race just wasn’t there for me. Across the
table, Lori Evanson looked at me with eyes as guileless as a child’s, and I was furious that Julie had put her daughter-in-law up to this. “Damn it, Lori, no! I told your mother-in-law no; I told your father-in-law no; and I’m telling you no. No! I will not support Craig Evanson for leader of the party. How many times do they have to be told, anyway?”

Lori’s eyes filled with tears. I could see that each of those startling turquoise irises was encircled – contact lenses. She pulled her braid around and began chewing on the end to keep from crying. I felt like I had kicked a puppy.

“Oh, Mrs. Kilbourn, I’m sorry. It’s my fault. Mark’s mother’s right. I’m stupid. But I wanted to do my part and she said I should ask you and now I’ve made a mess of everything, and I’m sorry. Please don’t be mad at her. It’s my fault. I knew I shouldn’t ask you. Will you forgive me, Mrs. Kilbourn?” She was crying noisily now, and heads were turning in our direction. This seemed to be my restaurant for scenes.

“Lori, please call me Joanne … and of course I forgive you if you’ll forgive me.” She was nodding energetically, so I kept on. “I just thought it was mean of her to make you do it. Lori, look at me. If you thought it was the wrong thing to do, why didn’t you say no?”

She wiped the tears from her face with the back of her hand. “Because I have to trust other people to decide for me.” She leaned over confidingly. “You know, Mrs. Kilbourn, I’m not very smart. Soren says most of the time I can decide myself what’s right and what’s wrong, but if it gets too hard for me, well, I just have to trust the people around me.”

“Like who, Lori?”

“Like Mark and his mom and dad and the teachers at the college and, of course, I have to trust Soren.”

“Is Soren a good man?”

A look of rapture crossed her face. “Next to Mark, he’s the best man I know.”

“What exactly does he do? Is he the principal or the head of the church here?”

“He cares for us, Mrs. Kilbourn. He does everything. He preaches and he helps the counsellors and he makes sure everyone’s fair and he gets our money for us. Before he came, this was just a little backwater Bible college, but Soren Eames had a vision.” (You could almost hear the violins soar on that one.) “Soren has made the college really special. He changes people’s lives – kids on drugs and runaways, but really just anybody. He could,” she said shyly, “change your life if you’d let him.”

“Lori, about the money. Where does Soren get the money for all this? Is there a central church somewhere?”

“We’re the church, Mrs. Kilbourn. Soren just goes out in the world and gets the money for us.”